Three women arrive in the night, seemingly from nowhere but the darkness itself. They appear human enough at first glance, but there’s something off – features that are too extreme, or too animal. A broad, flat foot like that of a waterfowl. Wolf-like fangs. A long, iron nose. They look frightening, but they have kindness…

“In days gone by there was a land where the nights were always dark, and the sky spread over it like a black cloth, for there the moon never rose, and no star shone in the obscurity.” So begins the Brothers Grimm “The Moon,” a cosmological story of how the moon came to be. Four…

(Note: I recommend first reading the story here if you haven’t before. It makes this post easier to follow.) Some stories resonate with a specific kind of magical practice. For “The Goose Girl,” it’s protective magic. In a culture where magic and witchcraft is often sanitized, limited to candle lighting, meditation, and personal affirmations (all…

“Once upon a time there was a girl whose father and mother died when she was still a little child. Her godmother lived all alone at the end of the village in a little house, and earned her living with spinning, weaving, and sewing.” So begins the Grimm Brothers’ tale “The Spindle, the Shuttle,…

Thus, her mirror represents the ability to see through the ‘veil’ that mystics say separates the visible and spirit worlds. – Skye Alexander, Mermaids (200). When I spirit journey, more times than not I enter the Otherworld through glass of some sort — a mirror or a window — a technique that has a long history in…